SUNDAY VIEW

SUNDAY VIEW; Secret Sharers: Solo Acts in a Confessional Age

By DAVID RICHARDS

Published: April 14, 1991

I always assumed the one person play was the theater's way of dealing with the shrinking dollar. You really can't get more basic -- a performer, a platform, a text. Take away anything else and what do you have? A loon emoting in the street or a mime show.

Lately, though, I've been wondering if the form, which usually brings a historical figure back from the grave to chat with us -- presumably in his or her own words -- isn't curiously attuned to our times in a deeper way. We have never been so besotted with celebrities. We have even come to believe that celebrityhood carries with it one duty above all others: an obligation to spill the beans.

It's still too early to pin a label on the current season. But if you're looking for distinguishing characteristics -- beyond the hullabaloo caused by the coming to town of "Miss Saigon" -- there's no avoiding the rash of solo endeavors. Julie Harris, assuming the strange, silvery persona and exotic wardrobe of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen in "Lucifer's Child," is only the latest example. She has been preceded by reincarnations of Virginia Woolf ("A Room of One's Own"), Huey Long ("The Kingfish"), Lyndon Baines Johnson ("Lyndon") and Florence Aadland ("The Big Love"), among others.

Economics, of course, is not to be discounted in any of these cases. The new penury is upon us. The city is cutting back on services, department stores on their inventories, restaurants on the $50 entrees. It follows that the theater would scale back, too, although when a show like "The Big Love" ends up costing $800,000, "scaling back" is a relative term.

There is, however, another explanation for this vogue of one-person plays. We're very close to it when, for example, Miss Harris first mentions the lifelong syphilis, "the flowering of Nemesis . . . inside me," that ravaged Isak Dinesen's health. "There are two things a woman can do in such a situation," she explains forthrightly, "accept it or shoot the man." Then, fixing the audience at the Music Box Theater with a look that is both elegant and defiant and perhaps a little mischievous, too, she explains what she did instead. "I gave my soul to Lucifer. In return, he promised to transmute my sorrow into tales the whole world would read. So, you see, I am Lucifer's child."

The British actress Eileen Atkins, who is the sly, piercingly intelligent and altogether bracing Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" at the Lamb's Theater, is ostensibly talking about women and literature when she asserts that "it is fatal for anyone to be a man or a woman pure and simple. One must be woman-manly, or man-womanly." The act of fruitful artistic creation, she argues, depends on "some collaboration . . . in the mind between the woman and the man." For a second, her fierce intensity goes beyond the confines of literature and seems to dare us, presumably so sure of our definitions, to define gender. A revolutionary's zeal is clearly stirring in this concentrated creature.

In both instances, the characters are approaching confession, and confession, these days, has become something of a national obsession. Rare is the sin that cannot be absolved by being publicly aired. Keeping secrets, once a component of good manners, is suspect. And in the theater, the quickest way to get characters to reveal themselves is to put them in one-person plays.

What other choice do they have? They're there to reminisce, settle scores, set a record or two straight and generally sum themselves up. Occasionally, they will answer the telephone or call out to an invisible maid. But those are just diversionary maneuvers. We're the ones they're really addressing -- owning up to, you could say. Conventional plays expect us to be no more than onlookers. But the one-person play casts us as confidants.

There was some critical disagreement over the value of what Florence Aadland had to tell the world in the recently departed "Big Love." As the mother of Beverly Aadland, onetime 1950's starlet and underage mistress of Errol Flynn, she witnessed Hollywood lowlife from the sidelines and fooled herself into thinking she was at the center of big-time glamour. But Tracey Ullman's extraordinary performance gave no hint whatsoever that the woman was holding anything back. For better or worse, sympathy or ridicule, there she was -- a flashy, foolish nobody, pouring out her tinseled heart to us and, since her candor was stronger than her vanity, admitting to an artificial foot, as well.

Likewise, Miss Harris's magical presence is the glory and redemption of "Lucifer's Child," a more ambitious play, but not necessarily a more successful one. The script is by William Luce, who has already stitched the retiring existence of Emily Dickinson into the luminous "Belle of Amherst" for Miss Harris and fashioned the travails of Lillian Hellman into the feisty "Lillian" for Zoe Caldwell. This time, however, his work seems particularly piecemeal and unfocused. The setting is Denmark just before and just after a lecture trip that Dinesen, then in her mid-70's, made to America in 1959 -- hardly a pivotal event in her life. Why, it may well be asked, are we tuning in here?